He said, “I got a phone call the other day…” and then I heard him dialing the voicemail extension. (I have two jobs on campus, so it’s not hard to recognize.) He grabbed some scratch paper and began transcribing some info. I was appalled.

Let’s break down what just happened. My professor had listened to this voicemail at least once before. He remembered it was in his voicemail box. He vaguely remembered what it was about. But he hadn’t dealt with it in a concrete, meaningful way.

Of course, Merlin’s influence on my outlook on this issue is obvious. But any of your stuff will have to be dealt with eventually. Whether it’s email or voicemail or snail mail, you will eventually deal with it. You will either delete or trash it or extract what’s valuable and discard the husk to borrow Merlin’s phrase.

But let’s push forward with the real world test case I started out with.

Here’s how I would manage this. I would maintain a list of current opportunities for students. This could just be a plain text file. Or, for more robust sorting, filtering, etc. a spreadsheet in Numbers or Google Spreadsheets. (What, you thought I’d say Excel? Bah.) This gives me a trusted system with which to manage this information. Then, when I check process my voicemail (batched, natch.) I would enter this information into that trusted system. One time. And then, delete the husk. Thus, the first time I encounter the thing demanding my attention, I deal with it the way I will ultimately deal with it because there’s no avoiding it.

Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. It might only be a minute or two spent re-encountering stuff that I haven’t dealt with, but multiply that by the number of items revisited and the number of times revisited and it’s suddenly not a small deal. Add to that the subconscious nagging of lingering stuff and for me, it’s just not worth the hassle. You’ll have to deal with it eventually. Don’t waste any more of your most limited resource on it than you have to.